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Image: Cloud Providers Comparison 2018

Our latest cloud providers comparison for 2018 includes a rundown of the new features released since April by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.

If your organization is already using or considering multiple clouds, you know that it can be challenging to compare which services are available from each cloud provider. RightScale Cloud Comparison provides a side-by-side comparison of the equivalent service names from each cloud provider along with links to the relevant pages on the cloud provider websites where you can get more detail.

Here are the latest features and services from the public cloud providers now listed in the free Cloud Comparison tool:

Azure Adds New Regions in France and Australia

Azure launched new regions in France including France Central and France South in March to offer French organizations cloud infrastructure where customer data stays resident within France. In April, Azure launched two new Australia Central regions — Australia Central and Australia Central 2 — located in Canberra and restricted to Australian and New Zealand government use and to critical national infrastructure sectors along with their partners.

Google Launches New Region in Finland

The new Finland region in Hamina includes three availability zones and is Google’s first in the Nordics, joining IBM Cloud which has a region in Norway. Finland represents Google’s sixth region in Europe and sixteenth globally.

Services Now Into General Availability

A number of cloud provider services that were in Beta or Preview are now in GA, including:

  • Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances
  • Amazon EKS
  • Amazon Neptune (graph database)
  • Azure Database Migration Service
  • Azure Database for MySQL
  • Azure Database for PostgreSQL
  • Azure Kubernetes Service
  • Azure Event Grid
  • Google Cloud IoT Core
  • Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL
  • Google Transfer Appliance

Google Offers Beta for Larger VM Sizes and Improves SLA

Google now offers in Beta new memory-optimized VMs (ultramem type) with up to 160 vCPUs and 3844 GB of memory. This provides more than the max of 128 vCPUs offered by AWS and Azure and a similar amount of memory. Google also increased the SLA for compute instances to 99.99 percent, which matches AWS and exceeds the 99.95 percent offered by Azure.

While IBM Cloud claims a 100 percent SLA, it only offers compensation after 30 minutes of continuous downtime, which nets out to no more than 99.93 percent SLA and potentially much less if there are multiple outages in a month.

Google Offers New Threat-Detection Service

Leveraging Google’s global infrastructure and security systems and now available in Beta, Cloud Armor is a new policy-based service that protects against infrastructure and application distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS and Azure already offer similar services.

Google Achieves FedRAMP Authorization, Completes IRAP Assessment

Google Cloud Platform now joins AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud as a FedRAMP-compliant service provider.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has also completed the Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessment, which is a security assessment used by Australian government agencies. The assessment covers the operations and security of GCP services, including those offered from the Sydney region. Although GCP has not yet received formal IRAP certification, the official Assessor’s Report and corresponding letter may be used by agencies to assess the security of GCP for government use in Australia and are available upon request.

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IBM Cloud Matches Other Clouds with Transient Virtual Servers

A multi-tenant environment offers unused capacity to IBM Cloud customers at a lower price. When the resources are needed, the workloads are deprovisioned. Similar capabilities are already available on AWS, Azure, and Google.

IBM Cloud Catches Up on Physical Data Transfer Service

In its bid to compete with AWS Snowball, Azure Import/Export Service, and Google Transfer Appliance, IBM Cloud now offers Mass Data Migration, a physical data transfer service with 120 TB of usable capacity to accelerate moving data to the cloud by addressing common transfer challenges like high costs, long transfer times, and security concerns.

IBM Cloud Launches Identity and Access Management Service

Leveraging existing IBM security solutions, the new IBM Security Identity and Access Assurance is an integrated identity and access management solution that automates identity and access management and helps manage security and compliance. AWS, Azure, and Google already offer similar services.